Agriculture and Asian American Literature

Agriculture is a significant yet understudied theme in Asian American literature. Representations of farming in Asian American literature often respond to and engage with agriculture’s important role in Asian American history. As farmers and as farm laborers, Asian Americans have been pivotal to US agriculture, and this agricultural experience was foundational to the formation of Asian American communities in the period prior to World War II. Additionally, literary representations of agriculture in Asian American literature navigate racialized traditions of American pastoral and Jeffersonian agrarianism. They have often done so in ways that highlight the systems of racial and economic exploitation at work in US society and position US agribusiness in relationship to US colonialism and neo-colonialism. Consequently, Asian American literature’s representations of farming can expose the assumptions around race, property, and citizenship at work in the agrarianism of the 21st-century US alternative food movement. The writings of Carlos Bulosan, Hisaye Yamamoto, and David Mas Masumoto provide case studies of these trends.

Bronzeville, Little Tokyo, and the Unstable Geography of Race in Post-World War II Los Angeles

The Japanese residents and proprietors of Los Angeles' Little Tokyo were forcibly evacuated in 1942. The district filled up with African Americans denied housing elsewhere. Its wartime name was Bronzeville. In 1945 when Japanese internees were allowed to return, the two communities, each with a history of race-based dislocations, made efforts to accommodate each other in a biracial "Little Bronze Tokyo." The efforts and frictions were reflected in the columns written by Nisei Hisaye Yamamoto in the pages of the Tribune, a black newspaper. A second evacuation in 1950 of part of the district for the construction of a new police headquarters injured the returning Japanese community but devastated what was left of Bronzeville. Bronzeville ceased to exist less from disputes between African and Japanese Americans than as a result of racist spatial practices by local government. In the immediate post-war period, however, both competitive and coalitional approaches to multiracialism made possible a biracial landscape. Both communities learned from the brief experience of "Little Bronze Tokyo."

Hardly “Small Talk”: Discussing Race in the Writing of Hisaye Yamamoto

On Saturday, April 13, 1946, an unremarkable headline on page 4 of the Los Angeles Tribune, one of the area's black weeklies, read, “Fontana tragedy was accident, Kenny reports after probe.” Without a credited byline, the article proceeds to deliver the facts of the case: on December 16, 1945, a suspicious fire broke out in the partially built home of O'Day Short, an African American, in the predominantly white suburb of Fontana, fifty miles east of Los Angeles. Mr. Short, his wife, and their two children perished in the fire. Robert W. Kenny, attorney general of California, investigated the incident after “protests of ‘whitewash’ from black organizations and sympathetic white groups,” aided by the San Bernardino County Court. The article reprinted the attorney general's formal statement: “There is no evidence that the fire was of incendiary origin or indicating the identity of any person or persons as the perpetrator of a crime; to the contrary, all evidence adduced supported the conclusion that the fire was accidental.” According to the article, “Kenny's report, besides officially clearing the case of arson, also dismissed the possibility of organized vigilante activity in Fontana with its terse concluding statement, ‘No evidence of such activity has been found.’”